National Insurance contributions

Presentation given to the Welsh Assembly Finance Committee discussing the background to good tax design, tax devolution, and the need for a new fiscal framework (including adjustments to block grant funding) to accompany tax devolution.

This presentation was delivered to the Nevin Economic Research Institute, Dublin on 13 July 2016

This presentation was given at the IFS post-Budget presentation on 17 March 2016.

This presentation was given by Barra Roantree at the IFS public economics lectures, held in London on 7 January 2016.

Presented at the IFS Post-Spending Review/Autumn Statement Analysis on 26 November, 2015.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has published a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the government’s current tax and benefit plans and the National Living Wage on household incomes and financial work incentives. This Observation article summarises the main findings of that report ahead of the 2015 Autumn Statement, when the Chancellor is expected to announce amendments to his planned cuts to tax credits. The report finds that both the package of tax and benefit changes, and the new ‘National Living Wage’ will, on average, strengthen incentives to move into paid work and to work more if in work.

Housing benefit costs us more today than it did before the welfare cuts took effect in 2010, writes Paul Johnson in The Times. Failure to build enough houses and tax regimes that discourage owner occupiers from downsizing have together pushed up property values. Increasing numbers of young people in particular now resort to paying spiralling rents – with the housing benefit bill taking the toll.

Paul Johnson, writing for the BBC, outlines the history of housing benefit and the gradual diversion of government funding away from house building and towards subsidising rents.

The 8 July Budget may prove to be George Osborne’s best chance to bring in some much-needed reforms to our creaking and increasingly incoherent tax system. This observation suggests some important directions for reform and calls for an improvement in the way policy is made. If this is to be a Budget for productivity, then both a better, and a more predictable, tax system should be an important part of it.

Paul Johnson, writing for The Conversation, says that the recent general election offered the electorate a big fiscal choice over dealing with the deficit, but we weren’t confronted with the big, longer term choices that we will have to make in response to growing pressures created by an ageing population. By 2020 public spending will be much more focused on health and pensions than it was in the year 2000. That trend will continue in the coming decades and it will mean tough choices on overall spending, tax rises and spending on health and pensions.